The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  – What are you eating then? I asked.

  – We can’t stay here any longer, Ashu said, we’ll have to go back to Belpahari and rethink.

  – And the military camps are everywhere here? I asked.

  Dhiren confirmed – In all the villages that have seen action. If not all, then soon it will be all.

  I could tell that a strange battle was playing out inside all of us, a conflict between despair and anger. Which would win? The endpoint of a course of action (or inaction) led by either was unclear, but if we could do something, anything, to dent some of the might of these EFR bases, then they would know at least that we meant business, we were not going to slink off like frightened dogs. Besides, we had pledged our lives to the revolution.

  I said as much, but failed to ignite any spark, only distracted murmurs from averted faces. Everyone seemed to have fallen into a small, private pit of blackness.

  We went back to Belpahari and returned, one day before a new-moon-night, to Gidighati, all five of us, armed with home-made grenades. Not everyone returned for further action willingly. Someone suggested that one way of staying on in the forests was to force the villagers to provide us with food and drink and other necessities, using the same method that the police were using to discourage them from supporting us. There was some indecision initially about which of the military camps to attack, the one at Majgeria or the one at Gidighati. Ultimately the decision came to hang on the most important factor: which one was closer to the forest so that we would be least on open ground, fully exposed and in the line of fire? Gidighati, therefore, it was, although I still tried to push for Majgeria even while I knew that it was a lost cause. It was a place close to my heart, since I had spent over two years there. But Party always before individual . . .

  It all went horribly wrong.

  Because the policeman on guard was dozing in his chair we thought we’d creep up on him and get him first: either finish him off or use him as a hostage. Ashu, Dipankar and I were moving very carefully for a frontal attack – Dhiren and Debashish, both in police uniform, were approaching the back of the school from the village for a rear attack – but we knew that we couldn’t nab him. There was too much open ground to cover and we would be exposed on all sides. I was surprised that no one was looking out of the first-floor windows at regular intervals. I hoped we were not visible if they did decide to scrutinise the surrounding darkness periodically. There was a bad feeling looping inside me, something coiled and heavy, taking in my heart and stomach. It was not the mixture of fear, exhilaration and anger that I had felt during the earlier actions. This one was dull, blunted, something that weighed me down and pushed me towards a kind of lethargy.

  A dog, which had been asleep and making tiny squealing noises in its dream, woke up and started sniffing the air. Then everything happened together, so that writing it down as a string of events, one after the other, somehow falsifies the reality and the experience of it. The dog stood up and began to bark. The man started, woke up and, in the time that he took to work out that the dog had reason to be barking, all three of us were upon him. Ashu drove the tangi straight through his chest and I shot the dog, both at the same time. There was an explosion – clearly either Dhiren or Debashish had lobbed a grenade into the building – then another, followed rapidly by the sound of shots and men shouting. We crouched low and waited for someone to come out of the front.

  The sound of confusion from the back of the building had reached a peak now. We couldn’t make out a word. The shooting continued, but there were no further explosions. This could only mean one thing: that they had got Dhiren and Debashish. Between them, they had ten bombs. We could see the light from the flames where something had caught fire. As Ashu was ridding the dead guard of his bayonet, two men charged out. One instantly bayoneted Ashu through his stomach. Before they could act further, Dipankar and I let out a roar and hurled two, three, four grenades into the building behind the men. We got one of the men on his thigh with a tangi while the other ran off sideways, presumably to get more men, now that he had seen only two of us. The building was burning. There was nothing to do except flee into the forest.

  We ran in short zigzags, as we had been taught. Then we heard the sound of two more explosions behind us. At least one of them was alive! I expected to be shot at as we were escaping, but nothing; the soldiers were concentrating on bombs being hurled at them. Which meant that Dhiren and Debashish’s lives were going to be the price for ours, unless we were caught too.

  I was panting so much that I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Once inside the brush, the running got difficult; we were nearing dense cover.

  Dipankar’s words came out in small bursts, almost incomprehensible – Not towards Belpahari, no. Bihar. Bihar. Giridih, we’ll try Giridih, not very far . . . My uncle, we could . . .

  – Can you lead?

  They did not have enough numbers to mount a search in the forest, not that night, so we had to get out before they called up more troops and surrounded the forest, locking us in there with no hope of escape.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1969

  INCREASINGLY NOWADAYS PRAFULLANATH finds himself dividing to become two persons. One of those detaches and watches the old, nearly crippled, broken fool lying on his high bed, sometimes even unable to wipe the drool threading out from the corner of his slack mouth. It has not always been like this. The feeling of doubleness, of being a spectator in his own life, is new. What does one do with one’s own life but live it? Now, to watch what little there is left of it from the sidelines makes Prafullanath wonder – has he stopped living? If there are two of him, as he so strongly feels, which is the real he: the one who watches or the one who is embodied, on the bed, afflicted by the needles and rods of gout, by the creeping solidification of arthritis, by the capricious fluctuations of blood sugar and, reigning above, the omnipotent emperor of them all, the deadly, yet silent heart disease?

  He can tell from the muffled noises that the final preparations are under way for Baishakhi’s wedding. She is the first of his grandchildren to get married and he will be lucky to be supported in a chair and wheeled out for a few minutes before being sent off to bed again. Both families will do a token obeisance to him as head of the family, blessings and all that rubbish, then will be relieved to carry on with the real business of celebration, away from his orbit of illness and senescence. No full-blown participation for him. Besides, what is there to participate in? It is not as if this wedding, in this falling time, is going to compare with the grand three-day events, loud with people and music, glittering with gems and wealth and opulence, that he had arranged for each of his sons. Well, for most of them, anyway. At each of those weddings he had insisted on a small projecting enclosure, much like a miniature balcony, to be constructed above the doorway for the musicians to sit in, so that guests could be welcomed with shehnai-music. At Adi’s wedding the terrace where the guests had dined had been wrapped in maroon velvet, and the maroon-velvet carpets on the stairs leading to it sprinkled with rose petals and rosewater. For Priyo, Prafullanath had had fifty-lamp chandeliers installed in every room. The finest caterers, four fish courses and three meat, and five types of sweets at the banquets – these were the luxuries to remind you that you had worked hard to get here, a private treat to yourself and to the sons who were going to carry on your line.

  But something about that phrase ‘private treat’ brings on an anxious confusion . . . some . . . some search for an answering image that will explain this sudden unease but he can grasp at nothing nothing except for the idea of a sharp edge or maybe an image could that be an image of a sharp a sharp a sharp something and then blood . . . oh god, it is best not to go there so he shuts that bad window because he has been warned by his doctor not to dwell on things that make him anxious or unhappy. But he has now lost the bookmark showing where he was before the intensification in his heartbeat began and cannot move back or forward from the bad thing that has cast its shadow
over him but refuses to show itself.

  The clatter of crockery, the busy feet up and down the stairs, electricians and decorators and catering staff and servants hollering and talking, children shouting, women chattering – does he hear it all or does he imagine them happening outside his door? One generation builds, the next generation consumes it to nothing; that is the abiding truth of life. That is the abiding law of Bengali life. Look at the Marwaris; they come from villages in Rajasthan, stick together, work together and build family empires in business that subsequent generations consolidate. Their wealth, power, dominion – everything expands. They buy up everything and keep it in their family concern because they know that the family is going to be the driving power, the unit of cohesion and commercial force. In his life, his family has been the eroding power: he built, his sons ate. His heart races again. He has exchanged his earlier bad place for yet another, as if each square on the snakes-and-ladders board he is traversing has the head of a snake on it.

  Then the biggest head appears, its flickering forked tongue reaching out over several squares to get him. Those words again, those words that could have only been said into the darkness, not when light made faces and expressions perceptible, when one had to look at people to talk to them. How like a child’s terror it had been, a child admitting a misdeed to a savagely strict parent, that same sweatiness under questioning, that identical trembling and pummelling in the chest, as he spoke those shameful emasculating words to the darkness in the room, to the walls of the mosquito net, those words fearfully testing what Charubala thought of giving up some of her gold to . . . to . . . to help them out after all it was not for his own benefit but for the good of all of them and maybe it was all a temporary arrangement these switchbacks happened in any business and when times were good again just round the corner there would be restitution he knew there would. All the while a childish superstition tugging away like a stealth current under the churn of his words and thoughts – someone who gave something and demanded it back was reborn as a dog in Kalighat crematorium. Worse still, the foggy wraith from an early chapter of his life: Jyotish Pal crumbling down while telling him of that great unthinkable, selling off his wife’s jewellery to keep rack and ruin at bay, and he, Prafullanath, so moved by it that he had helped his friend with money so that he could hold on to his store on Harrison Road. He has now become what he was most terrified of.

  Priyo feels the diminishment as pity in his soul. What anger there was that his daughter has chosen a callow, flashy ne’er-do-well for a husband instead of dutifully allowing her parents to find her the right kind of man has now burned itself out; the residue in the crucible is resigned pity. Pity because her wedding is going to be so much more restrained than his own or his brothers’ had been. What had been a river in spate runs as a contemptible trickle now, like a baby’s piss-stream. His daughter’s in-laws had not noticed; the dowry they had demanded had been pegged to a public idea of the Ghoshes’ financial might and standing. It had been far-sighted of Priyo’s father to have bought so much jewellery during the days of plenty. Garlands of gold guineas; armbands of solid gold studded with emeralds and rubies and diamonds; lurid tiaras – what was he thinking? or, more pertinently, of whom was he thinking? – encrusted with gems; sometimes even plain solid-gold bricks. There was no way the family could have lived up to what had been expected of them, had it not been for his mother’s jewellery hoard: it had helped them save face. The outside world has so far been kept from noticing that family jewellery is being sold off or pawned to surmount liquidity problems. Or so he thinks. The fear that others may have an inkling sends a familiar feeling in to his guts, a feeling that he needs to evacuate immediately.

  He tries to dispel the sensation by dwelling on how he is literally going to cover his daughter in gold, for everyone to see, at her wedding. No one outside need know that his mother has only loaned what is left of her jewellery to prop up the illusion of family wealth; since his wife and his mother had so recently fallen out with each other over the contentious issue of ornaments, his mother is in no mood to part with any of her belongings to help Purnima.

  ‘Take them to deck Baishakhi. But I want them back, each and every single one of them. I’m counting out the pieces, so I’ll know if anything goes missing. It was an evil hour when I gave my blessings on your marriage to that woman,’ Charubala said.

  The situation is not ideal, far from it, but averting this public loss of face somehow compensates for the private shame he feels at being unable to give his daughter the kind of wedding that people in Bhabanipur would talk about in years to come. They will say, ‘He covered his daughter in gold’ and that will be consolation enough, for satisfaction is not going to come from the number of guests (limited to 150 only), shehnai-players sitting in a temporary Juliet balcony (they were going to play records of Bismillah Khan and have a loudspeaker to broadcast the music) or posh caterer (merely a hired cook). Yes, he feels sorry for Baishakhi. Then he begins playing the game, comforting and incendiary in equal measure, of casting about to blame someone, something . . . Today, the long shadows thrown by his father’s stubborn insistence on a radical technological upgrade at the plant at Memari would do.

  When Priyo began to discover how much Baba had exposed to risk for the sake of the modernisation of the plant at Memari, the offering up of the Bali mill as collateral seemed the most breathtaking. At the time the other detail, that the larger part of Ma’s jewellery in the locker, and all of the family’s investment in gold, had been bound as security too, had seemed trivial, a matter of the private domain, easily containable. Now that petty subclause raises its head to bite him every day as if in punishment for being written off as harmless. Over the last ten years choice bits and pieces, mostly the pure-gold biscuits, had been sold, sometimes to pay the pressing interest on a loan, sometimes to nibble away at the principal of such a loan from the bank. When those gold ingots were all gone, it was the turn of his mother’s jewellery. One evening, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster that was the upgrade of Memari, he and Dada, seeing no way out, had broached the topic of needing a lump sum of ready cash in front of their mother. The money was required for bribing customs officials to release the imported machinery from Kidderpore Docks. They had perhaps not initiated the conversation pointedly, with the implicit purpose of asking their mother to release some of her ornaments. They had not even known, if he remembers the evening correctly, that she was participating in this men’s chat, so that the words she had used to enter the discussion had felt like a slap to their faces.

  ‘Sell my garlands of guineas,’ she had said. ‘They’ve already been pledged to the bank as security, your father has told me. What difference does it make if what almost belongs to the banks becomes totally theirs? At least it’ll save us from shame.’

  The brothers’ burning faces had felt too heavy to lift up to look at their mother, or at each other. Priyo can close his eyes now and summon up exactly the configuration of the residual grains of rice on the plate, the wipe-marks of his fingers on the central smear of drying yellow gravy, the vertebral column of the fish picked clean and its head chewed and the fibrous bits rejected in a compact grey bolus on one side.

  Their mother had filled the silence with words meant to soothe and salvage. ‘What’s the big deal?’ she had said. ‘What’s mine is yours, you’re my sons. Money, gold – these things come and go. It’s not good to form attachments to these things. I’m selling off my gold today, it’ll come back to me tomorrow, I know it.’

  But Priyo thinks of it as the beginning of the long plunder. He has no idea what she makes of the business of having to sell off most of her valuables to pay for the mistakes of her husband, and it is not something that can ever be talked about, but now, seeing her sudden parsimony at parting, even temporarily, with what little she has left, it is her generosity that lashes him, and the curdling of that largesse because of the conflict with his wife is a reduction of his spirit, not his mother’s.


  And Baba? What had he made of his shame? Conveniently enough, he had still been on his protracted recovery arc after his first heart attack in 1957, the one nearly two years before the new machines arrived, so not much could be raised with him, most definitely not in any accusatory or angrily remonstrating ways. The potential confrontation would itself then have become the excuse for another bout of illness, possibly even another heart attack. Priyo and Adi had struggled on as best as they could, coping with nearly six years of zero output at Memari. When, at last, the new machines had started working, the TPD had increased by a risible twenty, not the 125 that Baba had hoped for and shown in the applications for the bank loans. It was going to be a long drought, with all the profits going to offset the crippling loans, but at least the mills, or – unthinkable – their house, wouldn’t have to be sold. The factory at Bali had continued to be their saviour. Some sadistic god must have laughed at this: within twenty months union trouble began at Bali. Two years later, the factory shut down. The full implication of putting Bali as collateral revealed itself.

  When Prafullanath had been inflexible about pushing ahead with his deranged idea of a face-to-face with Dulal, Priyo and Adi had said, over and over, ‘Baba, this is madness. You are the arch-enemy for him and his CPI(M) paymasters, why would he even want a meeting with you?’

  Rage, lidded down for months, had turned Prafullanath into a creature that was not quite he, but an approximate simulacrum. Ever since he had come to know of Dulal’s mischief-making, he had wanted to use the most aggressive strategies to deal with the man – having him beaten up, even eliminated, by goons; firing his father, Madan; bribing powerful people who could pull strings for him at the CPI(M) headquarters on Potuatola Lane to have either the union defanged or the police ordered to act. Not for the first time Priyo had wondered if he shouldn’t have immediately told his father and Dada about that meeting with Ashoke-babu instead of sitting on it for over a year. Would Dulal have reached this stature if he had addressed the issue then? Would they ever have reached this point?